Couldn't be bothered to watch anything from this contributor, won't let him ruin another site for me; who exactly is giving MK a hard time, though? MK was bad and fun, SF was stupid and horribad, MK:A was stupid and horribad. It doesn't hold up now any better than MK1~3 do; it was fine in the 90s though.

Nasrin:I'm pretty sure the first couple CDs I bought as a kid were the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and a Mortal Kombat remixes album. I love the films, and the sequels, bad or no. Costumes are great, soundtrack rocks, and the fight scenes are interesting and well choreographed. Who cares about deep acting? They're just beating each other up anyway.

I love how the MK techno theme has been played in every single martial arts demo since that movie came out XD

Calling it the best video game to movie adaptation ever is actually doing it a great disservice; forget about the video game connection for a few seconds and what you've got is a pretty damn good martial arts / Eastern action movie. Yeah, the Sonya / Kano fight could have been a bit better, but Cage / Scorpion and Liu Kang / Reptile are both amazing. Couple that with some honestly relatively smart changes (Raiden is, lest we forget, a god; he'd be overpowered if he did any actual fighting and thus works well when translated into more of a mentor) while retaining the critical aspects of making each character at least recognisable, mix in the awesome soundtrack, and the result is just a plain good film. No, it's not Enter The Dragon (very few films are), but it's still a perfectly decent movie that doesn't just feel like somebody was trading on a name. It honestly felt like Paul WS Anderson and the team put in some form of effort; as opposed to Uwe Boll, who doesn't care, and the Street Fighter movie, which was probably just working on a picture of the characters.

I remember seeing this in the cinema. Good times. The characters were done right. Ok some looked cheezy, but they looked like that in the game so fans can enjoy them. The moves were there from the game. Loved that scene with Goro getting punched in the balls. :-)Pity other movies cant just roll with what the game is instead of making it into something else for the non fans.

I would like to point out that Scorpion, at the end of his fight with Johnny Cage, explodes. For no reason. He just fucking explodes. That is absurd, and awesome, and dumb, and retarded, and one of the greatest things ever.

So, Jim basically argues that the people responsible for Street Fighter intentionally made it a pile of shit so that it could be enjoyed as a "so-bad-it's-good" schlock masterpiece. I think that is giving the film makers far, far too much credit. Like I said, it's been a while since I've seen it, so maybe I'll find more entertainment value in it now than I did before. But I very much doubt it.

Paul Anderson tried to make a move out of moments. Sure, it's not in Anderson's DNA to make a better movie than cheddar, and I couldn't argue that the fight scenes were great for its time, but it could have been a better movie.

Not sure this one really needed defending. You have a kick ass soundtrack. You never have to ask who a character is if you played the games. The first movie didn't do a character over load so all the characters in the film get some time to shine. Some really cool fights. Cheesy in just the right ways.

Mortal Kombat sits safely on the list of movies I love. It's the kind of fun you'd normally have to look to Hong Kong action movies for.

el_kabong:I disagree with Jim on only one, extremely crucial, point. The fight scenes are not great. There are some great fight scenes in there, but they are peppered with really sloppily done work and lackluster martial performances.

I always rather liked them since the reminded me of several actual bouts I've seen, and none of them really do any of the 'speedy' martial arts like Wing Chun. One other thing I also liked is that while Liu Kang is 'the hero', he's still kind of a dick. Rude, sarcastic and a bit dim. I also agree that the costumes are actually pretty high quality and while they do stick out, there's nothing 'unreal' about them.

If I had to nit pick, I think it would have been easier on the budget to let Scorpion's 'Get over here' gimmick remain a spear and Sub Zero's death was a little anti-climactic (which is a shame since his fight has one of the better backing tracks) and that shot of him doing what I assume was his 'fatality' freeze and the one from the demo at the dinner, was FUCKING EXCELLENT.

I wouldn't say it's the best adaptation out there, but I do have a lot of fond memories attached to this movie. This, to me, exemplifies the 90's as I remember them: simpler, happier times when guys got away with excessive gore and liking gloopy, slime-filled toys. This is when I got up in the morning to watch cartoons and when said cartoons were actually worth a damn.

Intellectually, though? Yeah, sure, it's a Paul Anderson flick so we know what we're getting. It's superficial, it's borderline shitty in some aspects and the special effects have aged terribly, but there's a lot of earnestness in this package - a kind of naive conviction that's the kind of feeling that makes me precisely want to get a popcorn bag out.

Like, say, Virtuosity. It's an awful turd with Russel Crowe and Denzel Washington living in a pseudo-Gibsonian world where virtual reality is all but ubiquitous. One of them is a composite of the personality models of a solid dozen serial killers and the other is a cop who's lost it all.

It's cheesy, it's way too earnest for its own good, and I love it for it.

I'm gonna join the chorus of "Since when does MK need defending?". It was a fairly well received movie that was praised for staying true to the source material while managing to be an entertaining action flick in its own right. Now Street Fighter... I'd like to see you defend that one, Jim. A terrible movie, bad action, butchers source material. The only two highlights were Raul Julia's over the top Bison and Kylie Minogue in tight outfits...

Mortal Kombat doesn't belong on this list. Not that it was terrible (it was certainly one of the better VG movies), but that it wasn't nearly bad enough or slammed enough. It was always, in my experience, held up as "one of the good ones".Now, if you'd decided to defend the slack-jawed puddle of drool that was the MK Annihilation, I'd understand.

I don't get the hate for Christopher Lambert tho, since as silly as he was Raiden practically made that movie.

My main complaint would come from the Sub Zero/Scorpion arc - or lack thereof. They're mortal enemies, why the hell are they on the same side? Even the original game manual gave them more character development than the film.

But I digress. This movie isn't anywhere near bad enough to belong on this list. At least Alien 3 had the dubious honour of being hated on by fans.

Megacherv:I have to argue one point, the best video game movie ever is Postal

Is it possible there's actually an Uwe Boll movie that isn't total shite on a cracker, or are the two positives I've heard so far for Postal just a minority?

Seriously, all his films have been ridiculous and stupid, so this time he tried doing it on purpose, and it is fucking fantastic. Because the world is already insane and you're expecting everything to be stupid, and bizarre out of nowhere plot-twists seem perfectly rational, nothing is offensive, and you just keep laughing at everything (even Uwe Boll's appearance is brilliant)

Megacherv:I have to argue one point, the best video game movie ever is Postal

Is it possible there's actually an Uwe Boll movie that isn't total shite on a cracker, or are the two positives I've heard so far for Postal just a minority?

Seriously, all his films have been ridiculous and stupid, so this time he tried doing it on purpose, and it is fucking fantastic. Because the world is already insane and you're expecting everything to be stupid, and bizarre out of nowhere plot-twists seem perfectly rational, nothing is offensive, and you just keep laughing at everything (even Uwe Boll's appearance is brilliant)

And I am seeing Zack Ward is the main character... I love Zack Ward. I might have to actually see this.